Keep Bush Out of the Forests

What is it that the vast majority of Americans want but aren’t getting? What is it that Democrats stand for but are willing to fight for only fitfully? What is it that Republicans claim they favor but really don’t?

Call it common sense. Or, more grandly, our future.

Either way, it’s time to say “enough” to the Bush administration’s baloney about restoring balance to the management of our public lands and our environment. Restoration? Let’s quickly restore some fairness and foresight before it’s too you-know-what.

Last week’s decision by George W. Bush to open our national forests to more quick-profit exploitation by lumbermen, oilmen and barons of industrialized recreation is a shocking step backward to the profligate ways of the 19th century. No, it’s worse than that. In the 19th century Americans at least had Teddy Roosevelt to raise their awareness of nature’s fragile treasures. To do worse by Roosevelt now in the 21st century is an affront. The eye of history will record it as a scandal. It’s a body blow to our shared wild lands, our wildlife and what remains of our heritage of nature. Enough.

No matter how you want to read the elections just concluded, there was no mandate, or even the hint of one, for this kind of return-to-pillage across 192 million acres that Americans hold in communal trust. A postelection CBS/New York Times poll found that voters, by a margin of 2 to 1, still believe that even in wartime, environmental protection is more important than oil development, let alone stepped-up clear-cutting of forests.

Yet a day after that poll was published, in an announcement timed to land when families were preoccupied with the Thanksgiving holiday, this president, who promised to be president for us all, opened our 155 national forests and 20 national grasslands to industry management. Instead of having a national policy for protecting wildlife and scenic values, instead of giving the health of the environment a legal edge over exploitation for profit, the decisions for use of our forest and grasslands will be handed over to foresters at each site.

No, not to independent-minded forestry professionals. These forest managers are political appointees who answer up a military-style chain of command to the administration’s chief environmental hatchet man, Mark Rey, a career lobbyist and mouthpiece for the timber industry who now sits as undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture.

This is how the new forest management will work: From the mouth of logging companies to Rey’s ear down to his underlings, who will march in step or get stepped on, hut, hut. The administration calls it public involvement. Enough.

In some quarters, this decision is being cast as the Bush administration merely undoing the extremist work of the Clinton administration. But that’s far from the real story. In truth, Bill Clinton was anything but an extremist on forestry. As on many issues, he was a eager compromiser. The timber industry got what it could from him, and now has made its grab for all the rest.

A logging industry spokesman was quoted as saying that the new system would merely restore “common sense ... and I don’t think it will necessarily mean more tree removal.” But if you have covered the timber wars as I have, you’d know different: If the loggers were handed a policy that didn’t allow them to “remove” more trees and fast, they’d be screaming mad.

In this case, they’re cheering. You figure it.

The administration says its new rules, which take effect in 90 days, will cut the time it takes to devise management plans for individual forests from six years to two. But wait, folks. What’s the hurry? Aren’t forests supposed to be forever? These management plans will guide decisions for the next decade and a half. The administration says the public needn’t worry, even though the new rules no longer require protection of troubled fish and wildlife. Imagine. As for assessing the environmental consequences of forest uses, Rey’s troopers will now have the path clear to do it in shorthand.

Common sense? Don’t believe it. I’ve spent hours flying over our public forests in survey planes. Yes, sometimes clear-cuts mimic the fires of nature, and landscapes re-bloom quickly. But there are huge swaths of our public lands ruined for short-term gain: great hillsides now barren because seedlings won’t grow in the hot sun of our changing climate, vast mountain slopes stripped by landslides when trees are cut and nothing is left to hold back erosion, webs of streams and rivers choked with debris and rendered lifeless by mud, wildlife habitat chopped into incoherent pieces.

That’s what forestry regulations are supposed to regulate: the good from the bad. This remaining slice of our shared lands should serve more than logging companies trying to drive up their quarterly stock prices.

Balance? Try this experiment in resource management. Take a sheet of paper and call it your forest. Tear it in two, saving half and using the other half. A balanced approach, you see. Then, take the preserved half and apply the same rules by tearing it in two again. Carry on for a while and you’ll see that what you end up with is a pretty tiny scrap of paper. There comes a time to say “enough.”